s the problem too. But just leave him here — she should go — and let him figure out what it really is if it isn’t what he just said, and she says she does have to be someplace now but he promises no more scenes here? — remember, this is her place almost every weekday and it’s already been embarrassing enough for her here today, and he nods and she says he’ll pay? for she’s had a pie and two beers and there’s his coffee, and he says he has enough on him, and she says leave a dollar as a tip too — two, even — that should smooth things over with the bar, and he says will do but just go, and he leaves right after she does, no thinking about it, there’s nothing to think about it anymore, he could see she’s had it with him, she’s probably got another guy and didn’t want to say it, she already gave him crabs a couple months back from some guy she met when he was away for those two weeks, but she at least told him when she found out she had it and gave him enough of her prescription medicine to cure it, and she calls that night, says he all right? he says yes, thanks, she says good, well that’s all she wanted to say, and he says thanks for calling, that was very considerate, but would she like to do something tonight? and she says after that scene today and what she said about him he still thinks she’d want to screw with him? and he says who mentioned screwing? — just to go out, a movie, he feels much better, whatever she’d like to do — a bar, even, or someplace for a bite — and she says didn’t he hear her today? She doesn’t want to see him again ever. She only called out of concern because he was in such terrible shape today but she can see even that was a wrong move, another reason why they’re so incompatible — that’s the word she was searching for all that time in the bar — they’re incompatible, because he takes things — looks at things — so differently than her — he looks at them as if he’s not twenty but sometimes thirty or forty years older than her and not because she acts much younger than she is either, and he says thank you, that’s very nice, what he wanted to hear, she’s a sweetheart, really, but if she has a few seconds more he’d like to say this — something he just came up with but had thought hard about since the bar and nothing insulting, so don’t worry — but the reason why he felt so bad about himself today and did that sobbing was because he thinks after her he’ll never get anybody, that she was the last one or possibility of one, that he has no job, no prospects of one, no money besides, and at his age, well he must have felt his whole life was hopeless and still does in a way, foolish and hopeless and on a terrific decline, and she says is he pulling one on her again? and he says when did he ever? and she says come on and he says absolutely, he’s not pulling anything, and she says then no, it’s not hopeless, it’s never hopeless, what’s hopeless is getting into the bag of thinking it is, but with him it’s probably just his thinking it is tonight, but tomorrow he won’t think that, she assures him, or at least not to the degree of tonight, and the day after hell think even less than like tonight, and he says maybe she’s right, maybe he’s wrong, she’s got a good point, he usually makes things seem worse off than they are, so thanks, and now he also wants to say that if she ever changes her mind he’d certainly like to see her again and yes, if it resulted in it then to end up in bed with her anytime in the future she’d like, so if she ever reconsiders, though he knows what her feeling now is about it, give him a call, and she says did she hear right? yes she heard right, well she’s going to tell him something now also, but something insulting but she also hopes constructive — if it keeps him from contacting her again that’ll be constructive enough — and this will also be the last words she hopes to ever say to him, unless he’s going to be one of those annoying-type schmos where she’ll be forced to get an unlisted new phone number, and that’s that an idiot — is he still listening or has he hung up? and he says go on, shoot — an idiot is someone who’s never going to learn anything in life and, she wants to add, not because he’s unwilling to either, and before he can say does she mean him? she hangs up. They never speak to each other again, he never bumps into her, sees her on the street, nothing like that, or meet any of her friends or hear anything about her till four years later, on a Broadway bus heading uptown, a woman waves to him from a seat when he’s walking up the aisle, he stops, says hello, she says doesn’t he remember her? he says he thinks he does but forgets from where, she says she’s Aluthea, Carrie’s best friend when he was going out with her a few years ago — she was in fact at the same party he met Carrie at — remember? she went out with his crazy friend Bernie for a while till she found out how crazy he was, and he says oh yeah, he remembers, asks how she is, then how Carrie is and she says Carrie’s married, living upstate, on something like a farm, her husband has lots of money and bought it, and he says that’s nice, he’s married too and not only that his wife’s two months away from having their first baby — a girl, though they weren’t supposed to know but the obstetrician’s nurse blabbed the results of the test — vindictively, they’re pretty sure of, but that’s over and done with and asks if he can sit and sits next to her and says is Carrie anything like that? — a baby, maybe two by now, even if it seemed she didn’t want to get married or have kids for about ten years — her education and art, she used to say, and she says her art’s not as important to her anymore and she’d like to get pregnant but hasn’t been able to, and he says well, they’ll go, if they haven’t already done so, for pregnancy tests, and maybe a tube will have to be blown through with air or whatever the process is, or fertility pills, though one has to watch out with those because you can wind up with triplets, and she says oh no, her doctor says that as a couple they’ll never be able to have children, that she’s simply unable to because of some incorrectible malfuction with her ovaries — not even an implant’s possible, it’ll just reject, all of which has devastated her for she’s been saying there’s nothing she wants more than to have a baby, and he says he’s sorry, it must be a hard thing to accept for somone so young, and hard for her husband also, and thinks how strange, for if anyone was built to have a kid and then nurse it, it was she, which was probably mostly what attracted him to her, her large tall shapely body, perfect but just bigger in every way, and she says it’s been a lot more than hard for her — she’s become a wreck over it, principally because her husband doesn’t want to adopt a child, he only wants to have a natural one, and he says an adopted one is natural but he of course realizes what she means and doesn’t know what he’d do if he were in the husband’s position but hopes they can work themselves out of the dilemma, and then his stop comes and he sees someone’s rung for it and he says good-bye and hopes they’ll see each other on the bus again sometime and to give his best to Carrie and walks home feeling bad for her but doesn’t say anything to his wife about meeting the woman on the bus and has never told her about that time in the bar. To her, Carrie’s just someone he saw one day a week for a while till she gave him crabs or a short time after that and the last person he slept with, though months earlier, before he met her. He’s thought of the sobbing scene lots of times since it happened, not for a while though till he bumped into Aluthea, and never could come up with what precisely brought it on and then kept it going for so long, since he doesn’t think he ever sobbed longer as an adult, and was always ashamed of it and glad he never met Carrie again. He wonders if Aluthea recalled the sobbing scene, since she must have known about it from Carrie, and if anytime while she was talking to him she thought of him peculiarly. Anyway, the culminating explanation — that her dropping him so unexpectedly came after so many other women had dropped him or had refused to go out with him when he heard about them from a friend and called or met them at a party and asked and by someone he thought would be the last to do it — she in fact had said several times that if anyone dropped anyone it’d be he — probably comes as close to why it happened as anything he can think of. Thinks why again. Yep, that’s about the best he can come up with. Sobs when his second daughter comes out but not as hard as he did with the first. “Wow,” the obstetrician says while she’s stitching up Denise, “I never saw a man react so emotionally to the delivery of his child.” “You forget what he was like when Olivia was born — much much worse,” Denise says she said when she later told him what the doctor had said, for he was sobbing too loudly and ferociously to hear either of them.